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Brain, Vol. 122, No. 5, 839-854, May 1999
© 1999 Oxford University Press

Electrophysiological manifestations of open- and closed-class words in patients with Broca's aphasia with agrammatic comprehension

An event-related brain potential study

Mariken ter Keurs1,2, Colin M. Brown1, Peter Hagoort1 and Dick F. Stegeman2

1 `Neurocognition of Language Processing' Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and 2 Department of Clinical Neurophysiology, Institute of Neurology, University Hospital Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Correspondence to: Mariken ter Keurs or Colin Brown, `Neurocognition of Language Processing' Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Wundtlaan 1, NL-6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands E-mail: terkeurs{at}mpi.nl or Colin.Brown{at}mpi.nl

This paper presents electrophysiological data on the on-line processing of open- and closed-class words in patients with Broca's aphasia with agrammatic comprehension. Event-related brain potentials were recorded from the scalp when Broca patients and non-aphasic control subjects were visually presented with a story in which the words appeared one at a time on the screen. Separate waveforms were computed for open- and closed-class words. The non-aphasic control subjects showed clear differences between the processing of open- and closed-class words in an early (210–375 ms) and a late (400–700 ms) time-window. The early electrophysiological differences reflect the first manifestation of the availability of word-category information from the mental lexicon. The late differences presumably relate to post-lexical semantic and syntactic processing. In contrast to the control subjects, the Broca patients showed no early vocabulary class effect and only a limited late effect. The results suggest that an important factor in the agrammatic comprehension deficit of Broca's aphasics is a delayed and/or incomplete availability of word-class information.

Broca's aphasia with agrammatic comprehension; open- and closed-class words; event-related brain potential; lexical processing

ERP = event-related brain potential; RH = right hemisphere; VC = vocabulary class


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